ASIMOV ON PHYSICS

Of making many books there is no end, saith the Preacher, and he never even met Isaac Asimov. Reading Asimov, however, is anything but a weariness of the flesh. He must be simply one of the best scientific popularizers who ever hitched his typewriter to a cyclotron. The accelerators at Brookhaven can hardly generate particles faster than Asimov can generate explanations of them--glibly predigested explanations perhaps, but serving a very real need. These seventeen articles (reruns from Asimov's successful science series in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) have been edited into a remarkably cohesive elementary account of wave propagation, gravitational attraction, temperature and kinetic energy, entropy, and various subatomic postscripts to Planck and Heisenberg. The peculiar Asimovian tone, which sounds like one brash adolescent talking to another, may be getting on your nerves by the last muon. But after all the man doesn't pretend to write anything but mass-produced popular science--and he can't be beat at it.